Vodafone New Zealand goes Flexi Lite

This blog is by Roberta Lima from the Networks business of Nokia.Twitter: @RobeLima

Greetings from New Zealand, where Vodafone recently piloted Nokia’s Flexi Lite Base Station to enhance coverage and capacity to meet this small nation’s big appetite for mobile broadband.

A small all-in-one base station optimized for outdoor micro-cells, the Flexi Lite BTS is based on the Flexi Multiradio platform, with its main application being coverage and capacity enhancements both outdoors and indoors. The base station is also small enough to be used as a pico BTS in public premises such as airports and railway stations. I talked to Danial Mausoof, Nokia’s head of Marketing and Corporate Affairs for the Network’s business in Australia & New Zealand, about the pilot and what made it successful.

Why was Vodafone motivated to pilot the project?

Vodafone New Zealand is focused on creating advanced solutions for its enterprise and government customers and small cells are key to its growth strategy. Piloting the Flexi Lite was a great way to make this happen and the operator is now keen to bring the small cell approach to LTE as well. Vodafone is leading the 4G footprint in New Zealand and continues to push forward aggressively on the path of innovation.

What was the attraction to small cells?

Vodafone saw the opportunity to differentiate with small cells and considers them as a key enabler for its enterprise and government customers, including emergency services who truly need a seamless experience. Vodafone talks about ‘Mobility, wherever you are, whenever you are’ and this drives its network performance.

To help Vodafone New Zealand make this happen, the Flexi Lite BTS will play five major roles in its network:

4. Rural hotspot – where Flexi Lite provides dedicated and economical coverage for lots of New Zealand’s major businesses (dairy, meat processing, etc.) located in rural areas where coverage is often poor

5. Holiday hotspots – where Flexi Lite provides the ability to add capacity and coverage far more economically than with a traditional macro solution; optimal for areas where a large portion of the local population moves to beach areas far from cities for the summer, for example, causing capacity headaches in areas with low traffic for most of the year

Check out the live testimonial in our video above

The jointly produced video highlights the key success factors behind this best practice pilot project, including the embedded team concept employed by Vodafone New Zealand.

To share your thoughts on the topic, join the discussion with @NSNtweets on Twitter using #Nokia #NSNperformance #SmallCells #LTE.